Bach the Progressive: Observations on His Later Works

IN 1730 Johann Sebastian Bach was forty-five years old, and he was not content. There is really no doubt about this; it is documented for us by Bach himself in two remarkable letters he wrote in that year which are uncharacteristically revealing about his life, personality, and outlook. In 1730 Bach had been Cantor of Saint Thomas's Church and Director of Church Music for the city of Leipzig for seven years and, as we now know, had already achieved the self-proclaimed goal of his youth of creating "a well-regulated church music to the glory of God." ¹ In fact, Bach had achieved that 400goal almost immediately upon his arrival in Leipzig in the spring of 1723, having systematically produced within the first four years of his tenure three complete annual cycles of church cantatas for the Lutheran liturgical year (many of them composed at the rate of one per week), the Saint John Passion, and very probably the Saint Matthew Passion as well — an outburst of creative energy that continues to astonish us, despite our not wholly unsuccessful efforts to account for it analytically and historically. ²